The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick | Page 2

extraordinary thing when we look at this
book, when we reflect that it contains within its pages no less than three
hundred and sixty characters, all drawn vividly and sharply, all
expressing different phases of human thought, and of human life, and
every one of them original; when we reflect that that book was written
by a young man of twenty-three years of age. In that book I found that
he portrayed with life-like fidelity constables, sheriffs' officers, beadles,
ushers, clerks, solicitors, barristers, and last, but by no means least, a
judge. Every incident of the early life of this great author bore fruit in
his writings. No portion of his struggles and experiences seemed to
have made a deeper impress on him than did those early days, as he
said himself in the character of David Copperfield:--
If it should appear from anything I may set down in this narrative that I
was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have a strong
memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim to both of these
characteristics.
His first introduction to the terrors of the law was an unspeakably sad
one--sad, indeed, to his affectionate and imaginative nature. "I know,"
he writes, "that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker, that
very often we had not too much for dinner, and that at last my father
was arrested." He never forgot--how could he, knowing what we know
the lad to have been?--often carrying messages to the dismal
Marshalsea. "I really believed," he wrote, "that they had broken my
heart." His first visit to his father he thus describes:--
My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room
(on the top story but one), and cried very much. And he told me, I

remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a
man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds nineteen
shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that a shilling spent the
other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before now,
with two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each side, to prevent its
burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room with him,
who came in by-and-by; and as the dinner was a joint stock repast I was
sent up to "Captain Porter" in the room overhead, with Mr. Dickens's
compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., lend me a
knife and fork?
Captain Porter lent the knife and fork, with his compliments in return.
There was a very dirty lady in his room, and two wan girls, his
daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I should not have liked to
borrow Captain Porter's comb. The Captain himself was in the last
extremity of shabbiness; and if I could draw at all, I would draw an
accurate portrait of the old, old, brown great-coat he wore, with no
other coat below it. His whiskers were large. I saw his bed rolled up in
a corner; and what plates, and dishes, and pots he had on a shelf; and I
knew (God knows how!) that the two girls with the shock heads were
Captain Porter's natural children, and that the dirty lady was not
married to Captain P. My timid, wondering station on his threshold was
not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I daresay; but I came
down to the room below with all this as surely in my knowledge as the
knife and fork were in my hand.
When the stern necessities of the situation required the detention of Mr.
Pickwick in the old Fleet Prison, we have produced a lifelike
representation of the debtors' gaol; and I believe that the reforms which
have made such an institution a thing of the past are in a great part
owing to the vivid recollection which enabled him to point to the
horrors and injustice which were practised in the sacred name of law.
At the age of fifteen we find Dickens a bright, clever-looking youth in
the office of Mr. Edward Blackmore, attorney-at-law in Gray's Inn,
earning at first 13s. 6d. a week, afterwards advanced to 15s. Eighteen
months' experience of this sort enabled him in the pages of Pickwick

thus to describe lawyers' clerks:--
There are several grades of lawyers' clerks. There is the articled clerk,
who has paid a premium, and is an attorney in perspective, who runs a
tailor's bill, receives invitations to parties, knows a family in Gower
Street, and another in Tavistock Square; who goes out of town every
Long Vacation to see his father, who keeps live horses innumerable;
and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks.